The world of unified information access (UIA) has seen more than its share of change recently. Two of its biggest players, Endeca and Autonomy, were bought by Oracle and HP, respectively, leaving Attivio, Inc. and its Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) alone to concentrate on advancing UIA. With its most recent release, AIE 3.0, Attivio is forging ahead, hoping to help its customers build better applications to deal with often very specific information challenges.

The European Commission adopted a Recommendation on Digitisation and Digital Preservation, asking member states to step up their efforts, pool their resources, and involve private actors in digitizing cultural material and making it available through Europeana. Among the key recommendations was an invitation to member states to create plans for their investments in digitization and foster public-private partnerships to share the cost and make 30 million objects available through Europeana by 2015, including all Europe's masterpieces no longer protected by copyright and all material digitized with public funding.

The Royal Society announced that its historical journal archive, which includes the first-ever peer-reviewed scientific journal, has been made permanently free to access online. About 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available. The Royal Society is the world's oldest scientific publisher, with the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appearing in 1665.

The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a not-for-profit organization and leading provider of licensing solutions, developed an in-app licensing toolkit for RightsLink Plus and Premium-enabled Publishers to add licensing to their iPad or iPhone apps. For the iPad or iPhone, as well as for traditional online environments, RightsLink allows a publication's customers to conduct licensing transactions of all kinds without ever leaving the rightsholder's website.

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on two webinars aimed at journalists. One was sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, titled "Beyond Google: Mining the Web for Company Intelligence." The other was a "LinkedIn for Journalists" training session, which is offered frequently by Krista Canfield, senior manager of corporate communications at LinkedIn. Both proved to be well worth my time. I thought I might share some of the best suggestions I picked up that are applicable for many researchers, journalists or not.

ILI365/InfoToday Europe Blog – infotoday.eu – news and ideas for, and by, innovative info pros from around the world, throughout the year.

destinationCRM Blog – destinationcrmblog.com – a blog from the editors of CRM magazine, dedicated to providing Customer Relationship Management information in a timely manner to connect decision makers and providers.

SpeechTech Blog – speechtechblog.com – updates on speech technology and its applications in daily life, covering everything from ASR to VUI, with lots of links, threads, and even a few pictures thrown in for good measure.